Goal for Texas: 3 million more college degrees

15-year plan for state, nation aims to bolster the middle class

Texas needs to produce almost 30,000 additional college graduates every year between now and 2025 — more than 3 million in all — in order to maintain a healthy middle class, according to a new report.

"You don't go anywhere anymore in the American economy, or any post-industrial modern economy, without having some kind of post-secondary education," said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. "The United States has to find a way to educate the vast majority of its young people beyond high school if we hope to give them access to the middle class."

But Texas may be hard-pressed to meet the goal set by the Lumina Foundation for Education, which calls for 60 percent of American adults to have a college degree by 2025, and which authored the report.

About 33 percent of working-age Texans, defined as those between 25 and 64, had completed a two- or four-year degree in 2008, the latest year for which information is available. Only 10 states had lower rates; the national average is about 40 percent, and 18 states had rates higher than that.

Without significant change, the report predicts Texas will reach only 39 percent by 2025.

"As a state, we started well behind other states," said Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes. "We have to reach the intermediate step before we have a shot at coming close to the goal of the Lumina Foundation."

The foundation suggests strategies for meeting the goal in a report to be released today. No state is at 60 percent. Massachusetts is closest, at 49.6 percent.

2015 goal within reach

Texas began trying to raise education levels a decade ago, calling for an additional 210,000 people to earn a college degree or certificate by 2015. Paredes said it is on target to reach that goal, and a more ambitious goal will be set for the following years.

One key will be encouraging people who attended college but dropped out before graduation to go back, said Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education.

"It's difficult to achieve these goals thinking only about traditional-age students," he said.

The effort is part of a broader call for the United States to once more lead the world in the education levels of its people, a goal reiterated by President Barack Obama last month at the University of Texas at Austin.

The effort is part of a broader call for the United States to once more lead the world in the education levels of its people, a goal reiterated by President Barack Obama last month at the University of Texas at Austin.

The U.S. is now ranked 10th globally, according to the Lumina Foundation.

Korea is first, with 58 percent of adults holding a college degree. Canada is second, at 56 percent.

'Political will' needed

"But it's going to take a lot of political will to do it," he said, noting that the economy and the growing number of minority students in Texas will make it more difficult.

Texas is one of several states targeting students who started college but left before earning a degree, a category that includes nearly 3 million Texans, and 37 million people nationally.

A new program could begin enrolling some of those students as soon as next fall, said MacGregor Stephenson, assistant commissioner for academic affairs and research at the coordinating board.

It will start with students with at least 55 hours of college credit, he said. Most associate degree programs require 60 hours, while a bachelor's degree generally requires at least 120 hours.

Merisotis said more accelerated programs — one-year associate degrees, for example, or three-year bachelor degrees — could help. For-profit schools and workplace-based programs will be part of the effort, too, he said.

A rapid decline

In the 1980s, 60 percent of Americans with a high school education or less were considered middle class, Carnevale said. By 1998, that had dropped to 25 percent.

"People who don't have post-secondary education are falling out of the middle class universally," he said. "The declining middle class is really a story of who got post-secondary education and who didn't."

People with less education are more likely to be unemployed, and they remain unemployed longer, he said.